On the night of July 14, 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a 19-tonne refrigerated truck into tens of thousands of people gathered along Nice's Promenade des Anglais to watch Bastille Day fireworks. He covered nearly two kilometers before being shot dead by police. Eighty-six people were killed. More than 430 were injured. The Islamic State claimed the attack. France was already living under a state of emergency declared after the November 2015 Paris attacks; Nice snapped something deeper in the national psyche — the idea that the open, celebratory heartbeat of French public life could be protected at all.

A decade on, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the World Cup semi-final between France and Spain — scheduled for July 15 in Dallas, one day after the anniversary — would begin with a formal minute of silence in tribute to the victims. FIFA confirmed the observance. It was a rare convergence of geopolitical memory and global sport: a moment designed to carry mourning into an arena of 80,000 people and a television audience in the hundreds of millions.

The ceremony in Nice itself on July 14 was attended by Macron, his wife Brigitte, and Prince Albert II of Monaco alongside Princess Charlène — Monaco sits barely a half-hour's drive from Nice, and the attack wounded the entire Côte d'Azur. Survivors, bereaved families, and officials gathered at the Promenade. For many of the families, the tenth anniversary carries a particular weight: a decade is the point at which tragedy formally becomes history, and history has a way of being managed.

Then came Dallas. When the whistle signal for silence sounded inside AT&T Stadium before kick-off, a portion of the crowd — audible on broadcast — responded with whistles and jeering. The disruption was not total, and large parts of the stadium held the silence, but it was loud enough to be unmistakable and was widely noted. FIFA and French officials did not immediately issue a public statement condemning it. The identity of those responsible for the disruption was not established in real time, and attributing motive to crowd noise is always a trap. But the optics were ugly: a terrorist atrocity that killed citizens of multiple nationalities, remembered in a stadium that couldn't hold two minutes of quiet.

The Nice attack was not a spontaneous act of individual madness, however much early official framing leaned that way. French judicial investigations established coordination links and prior knowledge among several individuals beyond the driver. In 2022, a French terrorism court convicted eight people of complicity in the attack — providing Lahouaiej-Bouhlel with a vehicle, weapons, and logistical support. The driver himself is dead, but the trial established that the massacre had infrastructure. That finding received a fraction of the coverage the attack itself generated.

For France, the semi-final itself carried a charged symbolism that went beyond sport. Les Bleus in a World Cup knockout stage on the anniversary of the nation's deadliest post-war terrorist attack, playing Spain — a country that suffered its own mass-casualty Islamist attack in the 2004 Madrid train bombings — in a tournament hosted by the United States, which absorbed 9/11. Three nations with open wounds, in a stadium in Texas, observed by a planet that has spent twenty-five years arguing about the correct response to political violence. Football didn't resolve any of that. It just held the room.

What the minute of silence actually does — for survivors, for the bereaved, for public memory — is genuinely contested. Grief researchers and victims' advocates have long debated whether institutionalized public mourning rituals serve the people closest to the loss or primarily serve the state and its need to demonstrate emotional competence. Several families of Nice victims have said publicly over the years that they feel the political class moves on while they cannot. The tenth anniversary, with its official ceremonies and a World Cup gesture, will test that tension again.

What is not contested is the arithmetic: 86 people went to watch fireworks and did not come home. The youngest victim was three years old. The oldest was 92. They came from more than a dozen countries. A refrigerated truck, a national holiday, a promenade by the sea — the attack's horror was partly its utter ordinariness of setting. Ten years later, in a football stadium on another continent, the world was at least asked to stop for sixty seconds and remember that.